Tag Archives: New Jersey

What: Featuring more than 150 movies and plenty of big name guest stars, this young film festival off the Garden State Parkway has quickly garnered a prominent spot on the spring fest calendar thanks to its mix of New York proximity, small-town charm, top-flight programming, and celebrity cachet (locals Stephen Colbert, Olympia Dukakis, and Roscoe Orman – TV’s Gordon from Sesame Street – serve on the advisory board). The music documentary lineup at this year’s fourth edition reflects that standing, with Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck and What Happened, Ms. Simone? stopping here before moving to small-screen ubiquity and Colbert interviewing Mavis Staples following a May 8 centerpiece screening of the documentary Mavis! about the soul/gospel titan. Legendary rock industry insider/outsider Danny Fields will also grace Montclair when Brendan Toller’s doc Danny Says screens May 9. (Read an MFW interview with Toller about the film.)

What: The Jersey Shore town that produced, oh, a couple or three pretty well-known rock ‘n’ rollers debuts a new festival packed with music documentaries, gigs, and special events. The organizers are promising to “fuse the rich musical heritage of Asbury Park with filmmakers and industry leaders from around the world and will involve the many local businesses, historic venues, and unparalleled talent that makes Asbury Park such an iconic destination.”

Alongside some nicely homey touches like a special competition for local filmmakers and a fundraiser for music education for Asbury Park kids, the program features some fabulously Jersey-centric special events, including a screening of the new rock doc Rye Coalition: The Story of the Hard Luck 5 (read our interview with director Jenni Matz) with a performance by the Jersey City cult band, and the last pre-DVD-release screening of Riot on the Dance Floor, a history of the famously gritty Trenton punk club (and long-ago Jon Stewart employer) City Gardens.

“Rye Coalition has had the worst luck of any band I can think of,” Chunklet magazine publisher Henry H. Owings says in Jenni Matz’s music documentary Rye Coalition: The Story of the Hard Luck 5, and by the end of the film you believe it. Certainly, the Jersey City quintet come by that subtitle honestly. Lots of indie bands have been swallowed up and spit out by the music industry, but few have seen their shot at the brass ring come so unexpectedly and crash so quickly and spectacularly.

Singer Ralph Cuseglio, guitarists Jon Gonnelli and Herb Wiley, drummer Dave Leto, and bassist Justin Morey had logged nearly a decade of basement/dive bar gigs and thousands of miles in dodgy vans when they landed a major-label deal in 2003. Over the years Rye built pockets of fans and drew press plaudits with a post-hardcore sound that underpinned stop-start dynamics and aggressive vocals that recalled Fugazi and Jesus Lizard with chunky riffing (they wore their classic-rock influences proudly on their sleeves, and in their tongue-in-cheek song titles) and a wild, pinballing stage presence that separated them from the emo crowd they were often lumped with.

Unfortunately, their deal was with ill-fated Dreamworks Records, which was sold by the time Rye went into an LA studio with Dave Grohl producing their fourth album. Industry machinations left the album in limbo (aptly titled Curses, it was eventually released by tiny New Jersey label Gern Blandsten), slinging the band back to Jersey City, obscurity, and splitsville. But Matz’s film, featuring gig and personal footage she shot of Rye throughout their career as well as interviews with numerous collaborators and admirers (Grohl, Steve Albini, members of the Melvins, Queens of the Stone Age, Nation of Ulysses, and the Mars Volta) isn’t just a cautionary tale of the music biz meat grinder but a rousing fan’s-eye view of an overlooked band and an underdog portrait of five tight-knit guys who went through the wringer and came out bloodied and ultimately unbowed.

Despite, or perhaps because of, his status as the most quintessentially American of contemporary rock stars, Bruce Springsteen is also enormous overseas, as anyone who’s seen him in Barcelona, Vienna, or Dublin (or who watched the admirably global fan documentary Springsteen & I) can attest. So it should come as no great shock that two of the leading historians of the Asbury Park music scene from whence came Bruce, Steve van Zandt, and their E Street cronies are a couple of Swedes.

Journalist and author Anders Martensson and photographer Jorgen Johansson grew up in the small town of Hassleholm, fell for the Boss as kids, and followed the trail to the Jersey Shore streets, dive bars, and outsized personalities that shaped Springsteen’s world and his music. Crucially, they looked beyond Bruce: in the Indiegogo campaign for their music documentary Local Heroes, Martensson traces his fascination for the larger scene to Springsteen’s liner notes for Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes’ first album, Continue reading →

Pretty much every city in North America has one: a classic punk dive. That funky old joint in a dodgy neighborhood where you saw Bad Brains, or Butthole Surfers, or Nirvana before they were Nirvana. The lynchpin of your local scene and the place where every act that toured in a van showed up eventually, and often regularly.

In Trenton, New Jersey, that place was City Gardens, a concrete warehouse across the street from a housing project in one of the roughest parts of town. In the teaser for Riot on the Dance Floor, a prospective documentary about the club, Ian Mackaye – who played his share of punk dives – singles it out as “a really filthy place”; another musician who gigged there recalls his band getting robbed onstage.

But City Gardens remains dear to a generation of Central Jerseyites (including Jon Stewart, who tended bar there for a time and is also interviewed in the film), Continue reading →

Results from the MFDB

Films

When they signed with one of the world’s biggest record labels, Rye Coalition was primed to finally get their glory, or so it seemed. Like countless rockers before them, childhood best friends started a band in a basement with a couple simple goals in mind: have fun and play good music. As one of the first bands to develop the new “emo” sound, they were at the forefront of a movement that included Shellac, Sunny Day Real Estate, Jawbreaker, and Karp. For over a decade they blasted through a seemingly endless array of basement shows and dive bar gigs as their talent and fan base grew. They released albums on indie labels and toured the country on bigger and bigger bills (At the Drive-In, the Mars Volta, Queens of the Stone Age, Foo Fighters). After gaining momentum from 2002's On Top LP, engineered by Steve Albini, they were signed to Dreamworks Records and none other than Dave Grohl came on as their producer. Then it all imploded. This film traces their career (culled from over 20 years of home movies and unseen tour footage) supplemented with new interviews with the band and those who know them best. Although the band was praised by critics and supported by an absurdly dedicated grassroots fan base, somehow these Jersey rockers never got their due. Until now.